Brian Teare, the recipient of Stegner, National Endowment for the Arts, and MacDowell Colony poetry fellowships, Brian Teare has published poetry in Ploughshares, Boston Review, Provincetown Arts, VOLT, Verse and The Gertrude Stein Awards in Innovative Poetry, among other publications. His first book, The Room Where I Was Born, was winner of the 2003 Brittingham Prize and the 2004 Triangle Award for Gay Poetry.
Author of the recent chapbooks, Pilgrim and Transcendental Grammar Crown, he lives in Oakland, CA and is on the graduate writing faculties of the New College of California and California College of the Arts.

Three Poems by Brian Teare

Californian

It began like this: a radio
midday, heat—remember?—a shriek

on the highway, and in the yard
Steller’s jays chafing over haggle, nag, their claims

a lyric tableau—pretty for the eye—how
sun for months stuck aureoles

of chrome around everything, even
your poems, omens

so no other disaster would happen.
But that there was dust—

it had not been so before in June,
grass dead at edges

where a dirt spread had begun, feral
cats interring piss into nasturtiums.

His death had become
the dropped side of a song, melody

undone by damage
exactly the feel of teeth entering

an apple’s bruise. The trellis kept
the jasmine rapt

as it collapsed in its own odor; so ardor also
trained the spine

of your weeping into a mind,
confluence of fumes and confusion. Over sills,

house to house, how perfect the fraud and emergencies.
So there were two songs

sung in counterpoint
to jays, argument about belonging to

a place,—remember—
prey and prayer, one struck

the other beneath the lyric image, playing flint
to tinder until on the radio

eastern hills caught fire: extremis,
excelsis, that is

how summer, all veils
and exhalations, courted the hills. How

already the church was burning
when your soul went out to meet him, to marry

his new weather—

[first published in NO: a journal of the arts]

Dead House Sonnet

house of each sentence endlessly hinged, house of each phrase
opened elegy
entirely latches, exactly latches, hasps, proliferant, endlessly opened, of
doors,
termini effigies, each noun in a house a nova of votives, wicks ashen,
burnt
them, syntax like bark that smoldered the garden in winter, nasturtiums
come summer undone verbs, burnt them, burnt tense, the present’s
past, burnt
that, house of ash, house a tinge, a reek of eucalyptus oil, burnt the wild,
burnt the intractable, weedy, deep-rooted tufts of thistle’s purple furze,
made
house to come down, trashed, screens slashed, jambs unplumbed,
without
doors, made drained porcelain the old forms, gave chip, gave to stain
structure, made gone what touched him, stripped paint, grain of floor,
made
gauged the gouge of form, form the firmament fallen, made whiteness
a wall, made framed the fallen lavish tragedian shadow where a picture
hung,
made what’s left a nail, nib, of shadow, made it mine tongue unto
nothing,
made it quite, it query, quisling, quietude’s quill, that silence : writing :
then sirens